CASUALTIES OF DRUG WAR

Pols To Hear From Cons' Kin

Norma Arenas doesn't travel much these days. She is 73 and frail, her legs,
are swollen from diabetes, and she is recovering from a stroke.

But she hopes to make a two-hour bus trip to Philadelphia next week to
remind the Republican Party delegates who will gather in that city to
choose George W. Bush as their presidential candidate exactly what
"mistakes" of youth have meant to her only son, Miguel Arenas.

He was an Air Force veteran who once earned $45,000 a year as the manager
of train repairs at the Jamaica railroad yards in Queens. He had never
been, in trouble with the law until, in 1992, he was arrested and charged
with being part of a drug-selling operation among the yard's employees.

Today, Arenas is in Clinton state prison in Dannemora, serving a sentence
of 15 years to life under the Rockefeller drug laws, after his conviction
for selling 2 ounces of cocaine.

Even state Supreme Court Justice Steven Fisher, who sentenced him in 1994,,
was troubled by what the law required him to do.

"People committing similar crimes ... under the federal law receive
substantially less," Fisher said at the time. "Who is right and who is
wrong is for the voters, and not for judges [to decide]."

Norma Arenas, whose husband died just before her son's arrest, has been
alone in her Bronx apartment since. Too sick these days to make the
seven-hour bus ride to Dannemora, near the Canadian border, she has not
seen Miguel since 1998.

"The neighbors help me with shopping and look after me," she said
yesterday, through tears. "But I don't have a life anymore. It's an agony
only God can know."

"Two ounces of cocaine is not a minor drug sale," said Queens Assistant
District Attorney Brian Mich, who was involved in the original case. "This,
was no choir boy."

But neither was he the chief of some Colombian cartel or Jamaican posse.

He was a young man who made a mistake and broke the drug laws. Some would
call it a "mistake of youth" involving cocaine. That's the term George W.
Bush has used when asked about rumors of cocaine abuse in his own youth.

In Washington yesterday, a bunch of politicians, Democrats and Republicans,
announced the release of a new study. The study says that nearly 25% of
the, nearly 2 million people in prisons in this country are there for
nonviolent, drug convictions.

Since 1980, the number of people entering prison for violent crime has
increased 84%, while the number incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses
has skyrocketed by 1,040%.

When you examine the figures by race, you cannot escape the conclusion
that, the drug war has become a war against blacks.

In some states, like Texas, the report shows, the number of whites jailed
on drug offenses dropped 27% between 1986 and 1996 while the number of
blacks sent to prison exploded by 216%, even though the reports show that
five times more whites use drugs than blacks.

The casualties of this drug war who never get mentioned are the mothers,
wives and children like Norma Arenas, left to fend for themselves on the
outside while their young men waste away in jail.

That's why Arenas and hundreds of others organized by the William Kunstler
Fund will be boarding buses for Philadelphia on Tuesday.

There, at a Shadow Convention organized by Arianna Huffington and the
Lindesmith Center, they hope to tell their story.

They'll be joined not only by Democrats like the Rev. Jesse Jackson, but
by, Republicans like New Mexico's Gov. Gary Johnson and Tom Campbell, the
California candidate for the U.S. Senate , both of whom are calling for a,
moratorium on this senseless policy of incarcerating minor drug offenders.

Over at the official convention, the Republican delegates hope to avoid
any, mention of drugs or the drug war. After all, they're choosing a
candidate who has never been caught with drugs.